Humor in the Historical Works of Tacitus

Emma Warhover’s Humor in the Historical Works of Tacitus

explores how the ancient Roman historian Tacitus incorporated humor into his historical works, and unveils the significance of these humorous motifs. Since the historian is one of the most important ancient sources on Rome’s emperors Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, readers of Tacitus have long been challenged by his purposely opaque style, full of unbalanced grammatical constructions and end-of-the-sentence surprises. Tacitus’ strange prose style reflects the remarkable times about which he writes, when emperors made bizarre and contradictory demands on their subjects and told obvious lies to cover up the cruelty of their regimes.

In serious texts like Tacitus’ historical works, humor can expose hypocrisy in the powerful, demonstrate the absurdity of imperial pronouncements, and simultaneously communicate why such offenses were allowed to stand. Warhover argues that major elements of Tacitus’ distinctive style, such as variatio, appendix sentences, and sententiae, create humor, and that Tacitus used humor deliberately to emphasize the incongruities that emerged from the principate. By employing humor, Tacitus followed Roman rhetorical traditions evident in Cicero and Quintilian, who agree that humor is an important tool for criticism. For Tacitus, humor is therefore not an amusement or decoration, but an integral part of his historiographic construction.